July 28, 2007

Dr. Purr-vorkian I presume?

Several skeptical bloggers have commented on the story of Oscar the nursing-home cat who can apparently predict who is going to die next. Orac thinks this is just confirmation bias – the nursing home staff remember the hits and not the misses. The Bad Astronomer points out that we need more information – specifically how much time the cat really spends with the dying as opposed to those who live. All this is true.

I remember this cat from a TV program about a year ago, and I thought then that the cat probably just preferred to sleep with people who were really quiet and didn’t move much.

I don’t really have anything to add to this story. I’m only posting to show off the brilliant punning headline I thought up.

In other news, hospice employees have noticed that air-filled syringes are disappearing from the stockroom. The only evidence found at the scene were some hairs and a few flakes of something that may have been catnip.

Real scientific studies have shown that dogs have an ability to detect cancer and oncoming epileptic seizures with accuracies rivaling clinical tests.

Cats are harder to study scientifically because, well, they don't give a shit what the experimenters want them to do, but I doubt that cats have a greatly worse sense of smell or hearing (suspected in the some of abilities of dogs) than cats do.

Ohwilleke: Citations on these dog studies? (That's citations, pls, not Dail Mail reports on the research). It sounds interesting but highly improbable, so I'm afraid i'm not going to take your word for it...